Lecture Notes

DATA MINING DATA WAREHOUSING

Unit-2: DATA PREPROCESSING
Preprocessing in Data Mining:
Data preprocessing is a data mining technique which is used to transform the raw
data in a useful and efficient format.

Steps Involved in Data Preprocessing:

1. Data Cleaning:
The data can have many irrelevant and missing parts. To handle this part,
data cleaning is done. It involves handling of missing data, noisy data etc.
  (a). Missing Data:
This situation arises when some data is missing in the data. It can be
handled in various ways.
Some of them are:
1. Ignore the tuples:
This approach is suitable only when the dataset we have is quite
large and multiple values are missing within a tuple.
2. Fill the Missing values:
There are various ways to do this task. You can choose to fill the
missing values manually, by attribute mean or the most probable
value.
 (b). Noisy Data:
Noisy data is a meaningless data that can’t be interpreted by
machines.It can be generated due to faulty data collection, data entry
errors etc. It can be handled in following ways :

1. Binning Method:
This method works on sorted data in order to smooth it. The
whole data is divided into segments of equal size and then
various methods are performed to complete the task. Each
segmented is handled separately. One can replace all data in a
segment by its mean or boundary values can be used to
complete the task.
2. Regression:
Here data can be made smooth by fitting it to a regression
function.The regression used may be linear (having one
independent variable) or multiple (having multiple independent
variables).
3. Clustering:
This approach groups the similar data in a cluster. The outliers
may be undetected or it will fall outside the clusters.
2. Data Transformation:
This step is taken in order to transform the data in appropriate forms
suitable for mining process. This involves following ways:
1. Normalization:
It is done in order to scale the data values in a specified range (-1.0 to
1.0 or 0.0 to 1.0)
2. Attribute Selection:
In this strategy, new attributes are constructed from the given set of
attributes to help the mining process.
 3. Discretization:
This is done to replace the raw values of numeric attribute by interval
levels or conceptual levels.
4. Concept Hierarchy Generation:
Here attributes are converted from level to higher level in hierarchy.
For Example-The attribute “city” can be converted to “country”.
3. Data Reduction:
Since data mining is a technique that is used to handle huge amount of
data. While working with huge volume of data, analysis became harder in
such cases. In order to get rid of this, we uses data reduction technique. It
aims to increase the storage efficiency and reduce data storage and
analysis costs.
The various steps to data reduction are:
1. Data Cube Aggregation:
Aggregation operation is applied to data for the construction of the
data cube.
2. Attribute Subset Selection:
The highly relevant attributes should be used, rest all can be
discarded. For performing attribute selection, one can use level of
significance and p- value of the attribute.the attribute having p-value
greater than significance level can be discarded.
3. Numerosity Reduction:
This enable to store the model of data instead of whole data, for
example: Regression Models.
4. Dimensionality Reduction:
This reduce the size of data by encoding mechanisms.It can be lossy
or lossless. If after reconstruction from compressed data, original data
can be retrieved, such reduction are called lossless reduction else it is
called lossy reduction. The two effective methods of dimensionality
reduction are:Wavelet transforms and PCA (Principal Componenet
Analysis).